Saturday, July 10, 2010

Rain and the Dead Garmin

Halfway through my run and with the rain pouring down, my Garmin 305 started flipping out, blinking between screens and none of the buttons worked. Got home and hit power+reset+mode and it turned off, but now it won't power back up. Ugh. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears. Looks like I might just have to buy a brand new one, but fortunately they're really cheap now. (Update: it's showing some signs of life. Looks like the scroll buttons on the right side are sticking, perhaps a side effect of the recent humidity. Still not useable at this point though.)

Other than that, the run went well. I purposely headed out right before the rain was going to start so I could have a nice cool run and minimize deer flies. I climbed Deering Ridge road hitting my splits in the 7:40s pretty easily on the three mile climb up, and then reached the hairpin turn to the dirt road for the run down. It was here the Garmin was flipping out.

Had to guess at my pace but I knew I was faster than going up, probably hitting around 7:00/mile along the dirt road. Decided to cut through the gravel pit and take the trail home, just to mix things up a little. Deer flies were noticeably worse here, and I was also in a stretch where the rain was light. Picked up a small, fallen maple leaf branch and whipped my back intermittently to keep them away. Still, they were nothing compared to yesterday morning.

Looking forward to racing the Bradbury Scuffle tomorrow. I think I've gotten a lot of my speed back at this distance, so I plan on actually racing it.